The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (70 page)

*
 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. The plot failed and he was executed by firing squad shortly afterwards.

*
 This was not the only muddle that touched Hudson. Undercover in Yugoslavia in 1941, all his messages were indecipherable until the London team realized they were using a different edition of the
Reader’s Digest
to code by. See Leo Marks,
Between Silk and Cyanide,
p. 85.

*
 Neither Andrzej nor Leigh Fermor were sent, and many prisoners were killed in early 1945, including the SOE female agents Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. Andrzej ended the war with Leigh Fermor, ‘swanning into Hamburg, Flensburg and Kiel and then, deliriously, into Liberated Denmark’. See the
Spectator,
Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘The One-Legged Parachutist’, (1.1.1989).

†
 Cammaerts later also visited Ravensbrück, where he must have spent some time thinking about Christine’s predecessor in France, Cecily Lefort.

*
 Although there were voices of support for the Poles, notably from the future Labour leader Michael Foot, in June 1946, 56 per cent of Britons polled were in favour of sending the émigrés back to Poland, while only 30 per cent felt they should be entitled to stay. See Lynn Olson and Stanley Cloud,
For Your Freedom and Ours: The Ko
ś
ciuszko Squadron – Forgotten Heroes of World War II
(2004), p. 401.

*
 Cammaerts was awarded the British DSO, French Chevalier (later Officier) of the Légion d’Honneur, and Croix de Guerre, and the Medal of Freedom and Silver Star of the USA.

*
 As, for reasons unknown, Britain had refused her a travel permit for Germany, Christine travelled anyhow and then asked Nina Tamplin, who was working in Berlin, to get her a permit. See Masson (1975), p. xxx.

*
 A year later Francis and Nan’s son was born, and they named him Paul, after Francis’s friend, the French resistance leader Paul Hérault.

*
 Christine’s distant relative Countess Maria Grocholska was connected to Rudolf Schelich, a functionary at the pre-war German Embassy in Warsaw who later served as a Nazi intelligence agent. See Roman Buczek,
The Musketeers
(1985), p. 41.

†
 Stanisław Mackiewicz would serve as prime minister of the unrecognized Polish government-in-exile between 1954 and 1955.

*
 After arriving in London, Łubienska devoted herself to fighting for rights and compensation for former Polish prisoners-of-war.

*
 One evening Ludwig Popiel took Mary
ś
out dancing, was too broke to pay the bill, dropped her home, and then shinned up the drainpipe to claim a kiss before he left. As Mary
ś
was sleeping on her mother’s bedroom floor she acquiesced to keep the peace, only to have him climb back up moments later, having forgotten his hat.

†
 Not expecting to get much more use from her Cairo evening dresses, Zofia sent one to Andrzej’s delighted niece in Warsaw, where it was impossible to buy clothes, but where there was little call for ball dresses.

*
 Smolenski’s brother in Poland was then arrested on the pretext that Smolenski was working for the Americans.

*
 The handwriting is not her own, and the initials below the message are undecipherable. Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, Christine Granville papers (1949–50).

†
 Probably Colonel Cookham.

‡
 Hanka Nicolle was the sister of the diplomat, journalist and author Tadeusz Breza.

*
 Andrzej Skarbek’s first wife, Irena, lived until 1982, and their daughter Teresa, Christine’s goddaughter, until 2002. Their family photos were passed to Teresa’s son, Andrzej Christian, born in 1956. Both Irena and Teresa were buried in the Skarbek family plot in Pow
ą
zki Cemetery. It is not known what happened to Andrzej’s second wife, Alexandra.

†
 At least once that summer Christine underwent some radium treatment in Bonn, but unfortunately there is no record of whether this was for a benign condition, often treated with radiation in the 1950s, or for something more serious.

*
 Free-passage schemes had been set up to the Antipodes for ex-servicemen, with the first 200 families leaving in November 1946.

*
 Aniela (Lela) Pawlikowska (1901–80) later also sketched Mary
ś
Tarnowska and Jan Skarbek on the eve of their wedding, and Zofia Tarnowska Moss’s daughters with their cousins and aunt Ada Lubomirska, although this was not to mark any particular occasion.

†
 Instead he started legal action. By March 1952 Andrzej was pursuing £30,000 in damages to his personal reputation and business position in Germany, in addition to repayment of his investment.

*
 There are conflicting reports of this evening. Sonya Masters claimed to have been at the supper party, and to have seen a man staring through the café windows, prompting Christine to respond rather stylishly that ‘when I was twelve or thirteen my father gave me a rifle and took me wolf-hunting. We had plenty of wild wolves in Poland in those days. I got lost and was attacked by a hungry wolf pack of perhaps ten to twelve beasts. I took my rifle and shot and killed them – all of them. Since that day I have not been afraid of men or wolves.’ Popiel, however, claimed that he had not walked Christine home because he understood Muldowney was safely in police custody. Later Stanisław Mackiewicz claimed to have walked her home, kissing her hand goodnight as he turned down her offer to come in. ‘No doubt, if that night I had accepted Krystyna’s invitation to visit her at her hotel, I would have been the first to be stabbed in the stomach’, he selfishly concluded. See Mackiewicz,
Two Ladies Die After Talking to Me
(1972).

*
 He later told the police that he thought he had stabbed her in the shoulder.

*
 Complete sets of dentures, or false teeth, were still common at this time, sported by Winston Churchill amongst others.

*
 Christine’s cousin, Andrzej Skarbek, identified her body on 17 June 1952. When he came out he was surrounded by press photographers and journalists, all anxious for a story.

*
 Four years later this would be replaced by a 10-foot-high wooden cross carved from a Zakopane pine, and set in a headstone engraved ‘Krystyna Skarbek-Granville, GM, OBE, Croix de Guerre avec palmes, Poland 1.5.15 – London 15.6.52’, alongside the ‘W’ symbol from the Skarbek coat of arms. The cross holds a shield bearing the Polish White Eagle protecting the Madonna of Cz
ę
stochowa.

†
 The few missing names included Christine’s former husband, Jerzy Gi
ż
ycki, still in Canada, and Wladimir Ledóchowski, who was working in remote southern Africa. ‘Is it possible for two lives as intertwined as were yours and mine, to disentangle to such an extent that the most important decision – when to die – could be taken unilaterally?’ he later wondered. See Ledóchowski, ‘Christine Skarbek-Granville: A Biographical Story’, p. 3.

*
 Teresa Łubienska was fatally stabbed on 24 May 1957, on the eastbound platform of the Piccadilly Line at Gloucester Road underground station. General Anders awarded her the posthumous Golden Cross of Merit with swords. See Jonathan Oates,
Unsolved London Murders: The 1940s and 1950s
(2009).

†
 For some former SOE officers and agents, the fear of retribution was very real. Peter Wilkinson reportedly never joined the Special Forces Club, as he was concerned not to associate with anyone who might know people he had helped to send to their death.

*
 The name Olga Bialoguski is incorrect. Polish men’s names of this type end in ‘-ski’, women’s names end in ‘-ska’, suggesting that McCormick invented this name. However, he also references Sir Owen O’Malley as O’Reilly, so the mistake may have been genuine.

†
 For a more thorough examination of Donald McCormick, see Jeremy Duns, ‘Licence to Hoax’,
www.jeremyduns.blogspot.com
(2011).

‡
 Maria Nurowska,
Miło
ś
nica
(1999). Nurowska’s father, Stanisław Rudziejewski, was the Polish soldier whose odorous feet and Virtuti Militari had drawn the attention of Jerzy Skarbek at the Warsaw opera between the wars, and who later helped Christine in occupied Poland.

*
 Andrzej liked to tell a story that in 1960 he was stopped and breathalysed while driving home across the British controlled-zone of Germany after downing a bottle of whisky. At the station the police noticed that his car had American number-plates, and seeing that his name was Kennedy, they let him off, assuming he was celebrating his family’s election victory that night in the USA. In another story, in London Zofia Tarnowska once swung open the door of his Porsche without looking, only to have it ripped off by an oncoming car. She was so upset that Andrzej felt compelled to buy her some perfume to restore her good spirits.

*
 The portrait, wireless, knife and some papers were donated to the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, where the painting is now on display above the stairs.

*
 In 1945 Private Reginald Keymer walked free from a cheering Nottingham Court room despite admitting strangling his pregnant wife in a local maternity hospital. A year later Frederick Booth strangled his unfaithful spouse in a jealous rage, only to be acquitted after just seven minutes’ deliberation. See Alan Allport,
Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War
(2009), p. 95.

†
 See for example the films
They Made Me A Fugitive
(1947) and
The Flamingo Affair
(1948); the books Raymond English,
The Pursuit of Purpose
(1947) and Elizabeth Taylor,
A Wreath of Roses
(1949). See also Alan Allport,
Demobbed,
pp. 162–74.

*
 Unless otherwise stated, all French sources privately translated by Albertine Sharples.

†
 Unless otherwise stated, all Polish sources privately translated by Maciek and Iwona Helfer.

*
 Bridge built her novels around her experiences as Sir Owen O’Malley’s wife.
The Tightening String
describes the start of the war in Hungary,
A Place to Stand
is based on Christine and Andrzej’s time in Hungary, and was first drafted by Bridge’s daughter, Kate O’Malley.

†
 The fictional Ginette, Countess de Maris, in Lyall’s
Midnight Plus One,
is based on Sylviane Rey.

‡
 Manning used her life in Cairo during the war to inform her Levant Trilogy of novels.

§
 Nurowska’s Polish novel about Christine was informed by her father’s memories; Wladimir Ledóchowski’s unpublished manuscript; and interviews with Christine’s post-war London friends.

*
 Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.